Ceri Radford is Assistant Comment Editor of the Telegraph.

April is the cruellest month…

What more appropriate poem for the first Monday in April than The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot?

Spring flowers

It's a poem whoseÂ beauty and complexity far, far surpass my powers of description on this aforementioned Monday, so instead of even attempting any references to intertextuality, I'm just going to paste in a choice extract, and a link to the whole work.

One quick thought – does understanding, or at least seeking to understand, all the references within a poem necessarily improve your appreciation of it? At first I loved the Waste Land for its sense of mysterious incantation; studying it andÂ unravelling the lines ofÂ Ovid from those ofÂ Dante ratherÂ blunted the immediacy, and the appeal.

(From The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot)

1. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breedingÂ Â Lilacs out of the dead land, mixingÂ Â Memory and desire, stirringÂ Â Dull roots with spring rain.Â Â Winter kept us warm, coveringÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Earth in forgetful snow, feedingÂ Â A little life with dried tubers.Â Â Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeÂ Â With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,Â Â And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Â Â Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.Â Â And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,Â Â My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,Â Â And I was frightened. He said, Marie,Â Â Â Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.Â Â In the mountains, there you feel free.Â Â I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.